


Tripod Climbing

by DesertScribe



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alien Biology, Extreme Sports, Gen, Humans being humans, In-Universe Meta, Interspecies Rivalry, Mars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 15:12:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18122825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Martians don't hate humanity; they just love watching 'stupid human videos,' and the sport of tripod climbing is likely to provide an endless supply.-or-Martians are trolls, but can it really be trolling if humans would have done the inadvisable thing even without any prompting?





	Tripod Climbing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quillori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/gifts).



_Article distributed by the Interplanetary Associated Press, originally published in the August 24, 1999 Sports section of the Lunar Independent Inquirer:_

## Tripod Climbing

### By: Yolanda Z. Newlyn-McKenzie

Some people say that Martians want all humans to die, but that is demonstrably untrue, because the extinction of humanity would eliminate a major source of Martian entertainment. Martians simply want _some_ humans to die, and they don't even really care which ones. They aren't going to go out of their way to kill us either, because that would defeat the purpose. No, Martians want humans to die of their own volition, preferably on camera in ridiculous ways if at all possible. Just as humans love watching videos of cats falling on the floor while trying to execute what should have been easy jumps, Martians love watching videos of humans getting themselves injured or killed while doing stupid things. Some say it is due to animosity, but it's just down to a deeply ingrained cultural valuation of epic levels of schadenfreude. If you don't believe me, then you don't know about the up and coming sport of tripod climbing.

There is little need to spend any time wondering what tripod climbing is, because it is exactly as the name implies. Just as mountain climbing is the climbing of mountains, tripod climbing is the competitive climbing of tripods, specifically the very large three legged creature native to the plains of Mars, known as _thumrruch-frf!-thrrt_ in the dominant Martian dialect and as _Titanotripodia horriblis_ under Linnean classification. The real question is why anyone would want to risk their lives attempting to climb such beasts. The answer of "because they're there" is becoming increasingly common among thrill-seekers, but the origin of the sport is a little more complex than that.

Humans can be forgiven for mistaking tripods for Martian war machines the first time someone piloted a ship close enough to get a detailed view of the surface of Mars through a telescope. Most other spacefaring species in the solar system made the same mistake, and the Martians made no attempt to disabuse anyone of that notion for a very long time. The ruse might have gone on for decades longer than it did were it not for author H. G. Wells featuring the tripods as the frontline of a Martian invasion force against Earth in his famous novel, only to be thoroughly mocked by first one and then an ever-growing cascade of members of the Martian literary community, until the proof became overwhelming that the Martians had been having a laugh at everyone else's expense for nearly half a century.

Why did the charade go on for so long? The Martians like to claim that the illusion of greater military force than they really possessed gave them greater political power in the interplanetary landscape. However, knowing the Martian sense of humor, they probably just thought it was funny. If anything at all has been learned by generations of humanity carefully studying Martian media, it's that Martians love to sit back and point and laugh at over-credulity, and the rest of the solar system believing that Martians had any sort of control over beasts as intractable as the tripods provided that in spades.

Soon after being forced to come clean by their own book critics, the Martians admitted that they were just as frightened of the tripods as any other sentient being was and had not even begun settling in the regions inhabited by the behemoths until after they were already technologically advanced enough to begin making their first forays into space travel, because before then the idea had simply not been feasible from a safety standpoint. Even now, those parts of Mars are sparsely populated compared to the mountainous regions, and what little civilization exists in _frf!-thrrt-kleth_ , which roughly translates as "Tripod Country" (with a prefix of "Godforsaken" being unwritten but heavily implied to the point that variations of _frf!-thrrt-kleth_ are colloquially used in most Martian dialects as shorthand for any kind of hostile wilderness or hellscape) is almost entirely underground with a few heavily fortified entrances scattered around the otherwise undeveloped expanses of open plains.

No wall, moat, or other fortification has yet been built which can keep a determined tripod from going where it wants to go. Not even Mars's grand canals, which are rightly considered to be one of the foremost engineering wonders of the solar system, can do more than somewhat deter the beasts from crossing those largest of artificial boundaries. A determined tripod at a full run can jump the canals at their widest points with a 75% success rate. Panicked tripods driven to distraction by the sound of low-flying spacecrafts have been observed hurdling the canals without seeming to notice the presence of an obstacle.

There are no spaceports on the open plains of the Martian prairie, even though on any other planet it would be the most sensible terrain on which to construct them. A Neptunian entrepreneur once attempted to build a spaceport at the midpoint between the three largest settlements on the Martian plains, only to abandon the project halfway through after too many tripod-caused setbacks. The noises of launching and landing spacecraft are some of the many stimuli which incite tripods to erratic behavior. An erratic tripod is an even more potentially destructive than usual tripod, and nobody of any species wants to see the levels of devastation which might result from a rampaging tripod trampling a newly landed interplanetary cruise ship carrying thousands of passengers or, worse yet, a maintenance bay full of malfunctioning reactor cores with their shielding systems in various states of disassembly. All Martian spaceports are in the planet's mountainous regions, and all goods and people bound for the plains of Mars must arrive their final destination by slower and quieter methods of transport than spacecraft.

There is no other creature in the known universe like a Martian tripod. They are, at their most basic level, a slightly tapering conical body supported by three long legs, with the entire outer surface covered in metallic-looking spiky armor plates, which is one of the reasons why they were so easily mistaken for war machines. The other reason is that they are enormous. Not even our most advanced 3D holographic projection technology can really mimic the experience of being in the presence of a living, breathing tripod, the way they displace the air as they move, the way the ground shakes with every footfall. Larger (though not by much) animals can be found swimming through the ultra-dense oceans at the cores of the gas giants. The leviathan serpents of Neptune are especially notable in this regard. However, no other animal forced to support itself on the solid surface of a rocky planet or moon comes anywhere close to a tripod in either mass or height. No commercially available sound system on earth can reproduce a tripod's bellowing shriek, which is a complex harmony which requires nine orifices to produce and sometimes spreads across five octaves. The technology exists, but it is considered dangerous to human health and safety.

Adult tripods can grow to be over two hundred meters tall under ordinary circumstances, with extraordinary specimens nearing two hundred and fifty meters, and that is just their base height. Then, in a few short weeks of extreme food and fluid intake, they nearly double that height for the duration of mating season by way of expandable hydrostatic skeletal structures. On average, sixty percent of the height increase happens in the legs, with only a ten percent increase happening in the main body. The rest of the height gain happens with the inflation of the so-called "battle crown" which tripods use to bludgeon each other into submission during mating duels which can last for days at a time.

These duels have been compared to the "penis fencing" of certain terrestrial mollusks, but that is inaccurate. It is true that tripods are hermaphroditic and that the mating duels determine which of the two combatants will impregnate the other as in said terrestrial mollusks, but tripods keep their actual genitalia carefully hidden beneath their armor plates until after the fighting is over. Also, the defeated party retains the ability to refuse mating privileges to the winner, though that option is usually only observed being chosen in cases where the duel results in significant bodily injury to parts other than the battle crown. The battle crown itself is both the main weapon and target of the duel, with fights ending when one combatant's crown has been battered to the point that it can no longer maintain its increased hydrostatic pressure and deflates. Shortly after copulation, the receiving tripod's legs will also retract back to their usual length, signaling to all other tripods that they are out of the mating game for the rest of that season. The so-called winner of the duel may also deflate its legs and battle crown, seemingly content in having participated in reproduction without incurring the increased biological burden of pregnancy, or it may maintain them and attempt mating duels against other opponents, though the hardships of battle greatly reduce chances of continued success with each new fight an individual participates in per season.

One might wonder why anyone would ever want to get anywhere close to such a creature for any reason beyond scientific study. At least for humanity, the answer to that question is the extreme sport of tripod climbing in which individuals attempt to catch hold of a passing tripod's let and then climb to the top of the creature's head and back down to the ground again using only the spikes projecting from the armor plates as handholds and no safety equipment besides a low power emergency jetpack. For added challenge, the armor plating on tripod legs is almost impenetrable without heavy weaponry and yet has a very acute sense of touch which will cause a tripod to attempt to shake off any climber who applies too much force to any single spike or holds on in one place for too long, and some are more sensitive than others. There is not yet any reliable way to predict how ticklish any given tripod will be until a person begins to climb it, though there are enthusiasts who are gathering data and attempting to break the code in hopes of eventually being able to create different competitive skill levels based on tripod behavior. There are also rumors of attempts to create a "hard mode" tripod climbing league which would practice the sport during tripod mating season, as if climbing tripods under regular conditions was not already enough of a challenge.

Martians like to claim the sport has a long history as a prehistoric rite of passage for Martian youth, but there are no mentions of it in any records which predate the 1920s. The true origins of the sport seem to have come from early Martian tourists visiting Earth and then attempting to create a home-grown equivalent to Spain's running of the bulls, only to quickly abandon it after heavily casualties and fatalities. It was mostly forgotten for decades until it was rebranded as the latest way to troll gullible humanity.

The Martians never expected humanity to become any good at the death-defying sport, though perhaps they should have, because humanity has shown time and time again that it can produce individuals who are willing to master ridiculous skills just to say they are the best at something. Knowing humanity, we probably would have come up with tripod climbing on our own eventually if the Martians hadn't beaten us to the idea, and just as many devil-may-care youths would have thrown themselves into the sport with just as much enthusiasm. While it's true that the failed attempts to climb the learning curve of climbing gargantuan beasts provided and continues to provide plenty of "stupid human videos" for the Martians along the way, videos of success are also becoming increasingly more common, to the point that the joke is on the Martians now, because this year marks the first time ever that tripod climbing will be a sport in the Interplanetary Olympics, and if Mars does not enter a competent team of competitors in what they have been claiming is a national sport, then they will lose face to all other races of the solar system and be forced to stand by while a human takes gold. Considering that few if any Martians have ever been spotted even attempting the sport of tripod climbing in the decades between those early days and the announcement of Mars being chosen to host this year's Olympics, the chances of that happening seem slim to none. They are going to try, though, if the sudden drastic rise in reported cases of Martians needing medical treatment for tripod related injuries is anything to go by. There haven't been any accompanying "stupid Martian videos" yet, or if there are then the Martians have been keeping them to themselves.

Whoever ultimately takes gold for tripod climbing at this year's Olympics, the event is sure to be one for the history books.


End file.
